


Dog Whistle

by TruckThat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (Or like medium Kylux at worst.), Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Blood, Drunkenness, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Serious Injuries, Soft Kylux, and despite all of these tags:, dom/sub undertones or maybe overtones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-01 22:06:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16773829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TruckThat/pseuds/TruckThat
Summary: Hux gets dumped, gets shitfaced, and meets an unusually large dog. Or something. Hux meets… something.





	Dog Whistle

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to my fandom Tumblr in November 2016. Re-posting all my Tumblr stuff here just in case of disaster!
> 
> The author's notes the first time around: "I have kind of a dilemma because I wrote this for this @kyluxsoftkinks prompt about Hux caring for an injured werewolf Kylo except that while I was writing it I thought it was a @kyluxhardkinks prompt AND SO what you have here is like… some medium-poached kylux. Some friendly h/c, some bloody injuries and dom/sub leanings. 
> 
> Also the original intent here was to have this in time for Huxloween which obviously… was last month, but also YOLO."

“I’m not as drunk I look,” Hux says to the huge fucking dog that is, all right, so there’s a really big dog out here, but Hux likes dogs. More or less. This one doesn’t seem to be doing much, and in fact it seems almost as surprised to see Hux as Hux is to have almost staggered into it.

So it’s fine that there’s a dog. Even if it’s the middle of the night and there should probably… not be a dog. He has to sit on the curb for a second to think about it. The dog sits too, prick-ears in neutral. Happily, it doesn’t seem much inclined to comment. Hux leans back on his hands and does not either overbalance backwards or slide soggily onto the pavement. He considers.

There’s no one _with_ the dog, is the issue, and Hux does not think he is capable of being responsible for that right now. He’s what the kids might call extremely cross-faded.

“I’m extremely cross-faded,” he tells the dog, “which is idiotic now I’ve said it out loud, just completely stupid. But. It is not the same thing as being. Extremely drunk.” He feels both sicker and also less like he is actually going to _be_ sick than he would if he were merely very drunk, for example. This last he chooses not to share with the dog. Who is still, for some reason, there.

Perhaps the dog is lonely. Perhaps the dog had rather thought he _was_ with someone, in sort of an unspoken but generally understood way that left room for both of their careers and also allowed for mutual gratification, and has only now, humiliatingly, realized that he is… not. “I haven’t regretted a night this badly before it was actually over in ten years. No,” Hux recalculates, surprised in a spinning kind of way by the figure he comes up with, “no. Fifteen. I’m a fucking forensic accountant now. _Forensic_. It’s _respectable_.” Ironic, is what it is. He laughs. Head tipped back, stars all blurred out. Even the dog probably thinks it sounds dizzy and bitter.

It occurs to him eventually that the curb he is precariously sat on is his _own_ curb. That’s the top bit of his front porch that he’s looking at kind of upside-down. He doesn’t need to stay out here where there is some enormous homeless dog and where actually it might be snowing and not starry at all. Or maybe it’s just cold and the moon is out and—light pollution. And things.

“Goodnight,” Hux says, heaving himself unsteadily to his feet. The dog makes a concerned move closer when Hux nearly topples straight back over again, but he rights himself against the fencepost. “I’m sorry we either of us ever moved to this shithole, you know. I hate this fucking city.” The dog seems like it would know. It does not look at all like a city kind of dog, now that it’s so standing so close and properly in the streetlight. So Hux reaches out, not too wobbly, to scruff his fingers in the ruff just behind an enormous fuzzy ear. It tilts into the touch, or maybe it tilts its great head in confusion. Its shoulder must come nearly to Hux’s waist. Hux confides: “I grew up in the country. Mostly. When I was small. Not _this_ country, I mean, just look at it. But it was — look, it doesn’t matter, but it was fucking awful, honestly — but at least you could see the stars sometimes.”

The dog _stares_ at him, which is what finally makes Hux self-conscious enough to fumble his way in past his deadbolted front door and flat on his face into bed.

-

Hux doesn’t get back out of bed until noon. Even then, it’s only because he desperately needs orange juice. He sits on the kitchen floor with his glass to wait for the additional blessing of coffee and squints enough to read through work emails on his phone, thinking about all the reasons that the night before was a mistake. The cupboard door thunks hollowly and makes him grimace when he rests his throbbing head back against it. There are… lots of reasons.

He falls asleep like that.

It’s ten PM and pitch dark outside before Hux actually reaches the stage of going out to buy milk and maybe bread. And maybe whatever else people buy when they haven’t got a single fucking staple in the house except for leftover pad Thai but are also at the point of not caring enough to rectify the situation. The grocery store will be closing by now, which is unfortunate but also Hux’s fault, so he’ll have to go to the bloody 7-11 and pay out the nose for it. The walk will be good, though. Walking is healthy; it clears the head and God knows Hux could use it.

He makes it about halfway down the front walk with this single purpose in mind. Then he looks up from his own feet and—

“Oh—Christ Jesus,” Hux says, made reverent with horror.

That is. He was right. That is not a city kind of dog.

Under the bare tree by the gate is lying, stretched out, the biggest wolf Hux has ever even imagined. And he thinks for a second that it’s sleeping, and then for a much longer, worse second that it’s dead, because—but it’s breathing. Raggedly. Even from where he stands Hux can hear it. Its side heaves where it lies on the ground and Hux knows that it has to be the wolf’s breathing that he hears. But, God, shit, holy _hell_ , there is a lot of—the bare dirt under the tree is, it’s _mud_ , only the mud is red and the mud is on the dog and the dog is a wolf and the wolf is bleeding out under Hux’s oak tree. Is bleeding fast, or at least bleeding _lots_ , from its muzzle and its belly. The dirt is wet with it.

Hux thinks, run, and then Hux thinks, help, but he’s back inside with the door still open, snatching a throw up off of the sofa—dry clean only, but—and he’s scrambling down the porch steps with the fabric balled up. He’s on his knees in the wet, in the rusty, filthy mud. He’s pressing down because the first thing to do is to apply pressure.

The wolf doesn’t flinch, doesn’t open its eyes. It just _breathes._

The cream wool of the throw goes dark and sticky a little slower than he’d been afraid that it might. A police car rushes past on the street outside Hux’s fence on its way to somewhere else: lights on, siren off. In its light the spreading stain is bright red and then acid black and then red again. This looks bad. You can’t move someone who is losing this much blood. Some _thing_. Hux can’t stop pressing on where he thinks the biggest wound has to be, but he can’t see what the fuck he’s doing out here either. He doesn’t even want to think what it looks like he’s doing, out here in the dark, if the police had happened to see.

This, then, he purposely does not think about. He just wraps the blanket and his arms all the way around the wolf at the shoulder, and tries to keep pressure, and heaves.

He drags the wolf like a sack of gravel up his steps and into the front hall. It weighs a fucking ton. Almost the only thing that Hux _can_ think about is how much it weighs. The smell of fur and blood—wet, red, _human_ blood—nearly gags him. But it’s not human blood that is smearing all down Hux’s front. It’s a fucking—it’s a wolf, all right, it’s just a huge damn dog. This is a job for animal control or, or for the _police_ , for someone with a gun, because there is a wolf in Hux’s front hall and either it’s going to _die there_ or Hux will stop the—the bleeding, the blood, and then the wolf will wake up and it will be Hux who will die.

Hux knows this; Hux has watched worse things than an animal bleed out before without so much as reaching out a hand. Hux has _been_ that someone with a gun. He’s still aware that he’s shaking. He still kneels back down on the slate floor to get a better look.

Under all that matted, wet hair is _not_ a stab wound, although that’s what he’d expected to find. It’s more of a slash, or—there is a whole patch of fur and flesh missing at the shoulder, bleeding only sluggishly now, but it’s a pretty big wound. There’s a cut on the wolf’s muzzle, too, a long one that looks like it _had_ tried to be a stab wound and missed. It’s gory but a little older, maybe. Mostly clotted like it’s from some other fight. Something that happened yesterday?

All right. Hux breathes out, slow and still unsteady with adrenaline. These are bad things, yes, but probably nothing that a wild animal cannot survive. There’s an awful lot of blood loss, but it’s _slow_ blood loss now. The wolf must have lain outside for quite a while before Hux found it. He feels bizarrely responsible for this, as though the wolf was waiting to be found. Found by _Hux_ , specifically.

Hux hadn’t noticed that long cut across the muzzle the night before. Then again, the night before he’d also failed to notice that he was not speaking to a domestic dog. And Hux, even now, even given that he has fought for years to forget this part of the whole thing, is very personally familiar with what bloody wounds look like the day after the fact. He prods at it carefully where it’s gone tacky, mindful of teeth, but the wolf is out cold.

His knees crack as he sits back to consider his situation. It is more clear than ever that this is an issue for animal control. This is in fact the _reason_ for animal control. His cell phone is right here in his back pocket. He should look up the number for the correct authorities, eat the Thai leftovers for dinner, and go the fuck back to bed.

Instead, Hux checks the time on the screen—10:27 PM—and stands to wash his hands in the kitchen sink. He can spare an old sheet or two, which will do for something to bind up that cut with until he can be back with… gauze, a lot of it, and he’s not sure whether the regular sort of antiseptic ointment is suitable for veterinary use but he adds that to his mental shopping list as well. Also, he looks like a serial killer, so he will need to change his shirt first. And his trousers. Okay, all right.

The wolf’s breathing has not gone shallow, exactly, as Hux wraps the gash in its shoulder as best he can, but it’s a little uneven. It’s difficult to say whether this is better or worse than the horrible, pained heaves it had been making when Hux dragged it inside. There’s a bad moment when he has to lift its great, shaggy head and he could swear, he could have _sworn_ , that one huge eye cracks open—and nothing happens. Breathing rather horribly himself all of a sudden, Hux ties the sheet off as fast as he can and scrambles back a few feet.

He is fully aware that this is not some kind of fairy-tale situation. This is dangerous; this is a wild thing and no one’s pet. It is certainly not _Hux’s_ pet, and he will not be thanked even if it survives. Even so.

People have raised wolves before and not been killed, surely? And rescued injured ones? And although this one is full-grown—is in fact best described as _massive—_ it had not hurt Hux at all, last night. It had come back tonight, hauled itself bleeding almost to Hux’s front porch, and waited. It is so still under his hands now, except for the breathing, that Hux is afraid for it when he knows very well that he should be nothing but afraid.

-

He has to walk back across his front yard on the way to the store and even in the dark it’s obvious that something big has lain under the tree and bled. Hux tries not to look at it. This is a problem for tomorrow, when he will have to set the garden sprinkler out even though it’s October. Not a perfect solution, but one that will at least remove the visible evidence.

Between now and the last time Hux did anything like this idiotic, there’s been more than a decade and one whole ocean that he put there on purpose. It’s enough to make him nostalgic, almost, if nostalgia was the same as feeling sinkingly ill about your own stupidity. Since he prefers not to indulge in either feeling and especially not to indulge them in a fucking 7-11, he doesn’t spend a long time on his shopping.

-

To Hux’s very great surprise, Hux does _not_ wake early and painfully the next day, perhaps disembowelled in his own bed with his intestines being ripped out. He wakes slowly and squintingly, though he _is_ in his own bed, and it must be quite late. It’s Sunday. All his skin is intact, as far as he can tell. The bedroom door is ajar—the sunlight from the hall is in his eyes.

He’d be prepared to take an oath that he’d locked that door, as it is in fact the only door between himself and the wolf he’d left bandaged and still unconscious on the front hall rug.

It’s possible that the whole wolf bit and indeed all of what Hux remembers as yesterday was some sort of very strange nightmare made of whiskey and dubious marijuana. Which would make it Saturday, not Sunday. He almost hopes for this. Because while Hux is, yes, very certain that this is his bed, Hux is not alone in it.

There is someone, possibly someone naked, lying still and asleep behind him. They’re close enough that Hux is aware of their weight all along his back, and of how evenly their breath falls so close to the very soft parts of the back of his neck. Of how all of the hairs there have prickled straight up on end and all his muscles have gone rigid with the fear of who, of _what_ , exactly, is there.

He’s being ridiculous.

He rolls over very gingerly, measuring his breaths, praying more than anything for a terrible hangover to slam down over him as soon as he moves. Nothing happens, except that he’s face to face with someone he’s never seen in his life. That someone is not asleep at all. They are awake and probably have been for a while. His suspicion that they are not clothed is emphatically confirmed, however.

“You’re not a hangover,” Hux says. It sounds even stupider than he feels and, hideously, it croaks in the middle.

“I’m Kylo Ren,” says whoever is lying in his bed staring at him.

“Kylo Ren.”

Kylo Ren nods. He seems tentative, but not in a confused way. The facts, reviewed very quickly indeed, are these: there is a nude man that Hux has never seen before in Hux’s bed, Hux does not have a hangover, Hux did have a hangover yesterday, and ‘Kylo Ren’ is how the nude man wishes to be addressed. He is big enough—and _naked_ enough—Hux can feel his own gaze sliding down again and he yanks it straight back up to eye level—to take up all of Hux’s king-sized mattress on his own if he wanted to. He is lying very, very still instead.

No one seems to be offering any further information.

Hux slow-motion scuttles himself sideways out of bed, aiming for casual but desperate at least to get his feet on the ground without disturbing the covers. The sheets cover little enough already. And Hux is… he finds that he is wearing exactly the pyjamas he remembers himself putting on last night. He also clearly remembers selecting this particular pair—rather a nice set, button-up silk with monogram; an impulse online purchase that he does not regret—because he thought it might be what they’d find his mangled corpse in, if it turned out his bedroom lock couldn’t hold out against an adult wolf. He’d thought the monogram might help to identify his body.

Hux digs his nails into the palms of his hands and forces himself to breathe in once, out once, and in once again. Detachedly, he watches himself flex his bare toes on the hardwood. It looks quite solid. Feels solid, as well. He turns slowly back to Kylo Ren, who has not moved to sit up even slightly, and imagines himself framing some kind of question, any kind of question at all.

“If you have nothing else to say,” Hux says, while Kylo Ren just keeps _looking_ at him, “I’m going to make coffee. Should I make enough for two?”

“Just water,” Kylo Ren says. He blinks, slowly, and he has huge, slow, liquid eyes that are a very curious tawny brown colour in the morning light. “Please,” he adds.

A terrible fresh scar bisects his face imperfectly, running almost hairline to jaw, and that eye colour is both strange and distinctively familiar. Hux feels sick, feels his pulse in his ears, and it’s nothing to do with any hangover. There’s no useful question that Hux can imagine actually asking him. He wishes, absurdly given that Kylo Ren is wearing nothing at all, that he had slept in more layers. He wishes he’d slept in his socks.

Against every instinct he has ever possessed, Hux turns his back on whoever, _whatever_ this is and goes to the kitchen. He makes coffee for himself, very strong. And then, this much accomplished, he comes _back_ : he stages himself carefully against the doorframe this time, as close as possible to the most viable emergency exit in the room.

“Kylo Ren,” Hux tries again, just in case the name sounds more plausible this time, “you will please tell me what the hell you are doing in my—in my home.”

Good God, he’d almost said _in my bed_. The fact that Kylo Ren is in his bed is immaterial; it makes exactly as much sense as if he’d woken to find Kylo Ren stretched out on the hall rug. Hux assumes, and he spent the entire time it took for his coffee maker to run through its cycles trying to find any way he could possibly be incorrect about this, that the hall rug is indeed where he’d left Kylo Ren the night before.

That rug has _blood_ on it. The kitchen garbage is half full of gauze wrappers. Both the front and back door are deadbolted; no one has gotten in and no one has left. Hux is not imagining any of this at all.

Kylo Ren shrugs against Hux’s sheets, apparently not ashamed of his nudity, the bizarre and frankly unbelievable alias he has tried to feed to Hux, or the fact that he is _not possible_. “You seemed nice.”

“Nice,” Hux says, flatly. 'Nice’ is not something that Hux has been called… perhaps ever. Even the word has a vaguely bilious taste to it—although that could perhaps be the edge of his fear, distant but very acute, over what he is about to say. “I seemed _nice_ , so you decided to…” He clutches his coffee mug so tightly he thinks the handle might snap off. “You decided to drag yourself over here and die on my lawn.”

There. It’s said.

“Yeah.” He sounds like he approves that Hux has caught on. “That was me. But I was never going to die out there; it was nothing like that. There was a… dispute. A fight. On your lawn, if that’s what you’re calling it. I won.”

Hux closes his eyes. He grips the mug tighter still, needing the creak of pain in his fingers to keep him here. “I suppose I should see the other guy?”

“There were three of them.” He doesn’t even have the decency to be joking when he pronounces this in his flat American accent, like an actor out of a terrible action film. Nor does he seem to realize that this might be an unsettling thing to hear. “You seemed nice, like I said. So I told them to take their hunt somewhere else.”

“There were three, what, werewolves? Intending to _hunt_ me?” Hux thought that saying this combination of words out loud might help, somehow. It doesn’t.

“Werewolves,” Kylo Ren nods, confirming. He scrunches his mangled face up, perhaps remorseful. “It was… my fault. It might have been. That they were there.”

Strangely that _does_ make Hux feel better, all at once. On top of being literally impossible, Kylo Ren is an idiot as well. He breathes out properly at last, unmeasured. “I won’t pretend to know you, but that seems likely, yes.”

“Well, yes. You saw me in the street; I’m not sure if you remember. Two nights ago. And so I should have…” Kylo Ren hesitates, worrying at his bottom lip. It occurs to Hux that he is being very careful not to move any part of his body below the shoulders, and also that as a wolf he’d been quite badly injured. That had been _his_ fur all matted with blood, _his_ torn flesh that Hux had tried so frantically to press back together in the dark, in his yard. “There’s a code. I should have—you shouldn’t have survived. Or I should have claimed you. But I didn’t. That’s why they were hunting you.”

Claimed him. Hux is not equipped to come anywhere near whatever _that_ would imply. So he goes with: “And you decided not to kill me, and to be half killed doing what I assume was _protecting_ me, even though werewolf code dictates that I should have died because… you thought I _seemed nice_?”

Kylo Ren stares up at him.

“You’re deranged,” Hux scoffs. “Rabid. I’m not nice.”

He tilts his head, and it’s a gesture Hux recognizes instantly from the wolf he’d met two nights ago. Part confusion, part leaning straight into Hux’s hands. “You scratched my ears,” Kylo Ren says, like this is some kind of answer to the whole thing. “You were very unhappy, and you were a little afraid, and you were still nice.”

He did actually bring Kylo Ren a glass of water, too, and now Hux even manages to cross the room to hand it to him. Kylo Ren takes it, quite uselessly, without sitting up to drink.

“Kylo,” Hux starts, but then there’s no possible way he can call someone that, real first name or not, so he corrects himself, “ _Ren_ , I was completely shitfaced.”

“You aren’t now.” Ren smirks lopsidedly as though he’s about to win some kind of point. “You weren’t last night.”

Last night. There seems nothing to be said in response to that, so Hux finally lets himself look at what skin is carelessly exposed between Ren’s chin and the edge of the comforter. Frankly, there’s a lot of it. Everything he can see looks… fine.

“Here,” Hux says, as businesslike as he can be while sitting next to a naked man on the edge of his own mattress. He sets his coffee down at the bedside table. “Let me see your side, at least. You were badly hurt and a bite—I assume it must have been a bite?—isn’t a sanitary wound.”

“It’s fine,” Ren says, and if that’s modesty driving his reluctance then it’s staggeringly too late. “I’ve already said I’m not dying.”

Hux has to struggle not to roll his eyes. “I thought I was meant to be displaying my limitless kindness as a nursemaid, here. And I can tell you’re favouring it. I’m not an imbecile.”

But the bandages Hux exposes when he peels back the covers himself are tight and neatly done, and they cover a much smaller area than he would have expected. He meets Ren’s chagrined eyes.

“I strapped it up again myself, this morning. When I woke up. You left all the things out on the counter, and I heal… quickly. But you’re right,” he sits up a bit with a wince, like he’s demonstrating he can do it if he tries, “it doesn’t feel great.” The sheet pools close to disaster around his hips.

“For fuck’s sake,” Hux snaps, “I wasn’t issuing a challenge. I’m fully aware that you must have managed to drag yourself in here under your own power. Just—just drink your water and lie the hell back down.”

Ren snorts at him around the rim of the cup and takes what must be the least grateful sip in the history of the world. “You might have a point about your bedside manner. You’re much ruder when you’re sober.”

Hux just barely restrains himself from snorting right back. Ridiculous. “My critical faculties are fully engaged when I’m sober, which is the difference. You’re clearly going to be fine. So, yes, I find myself wondering why you dragged yourself _here_ , while you were dragging. You might have conveniently crawled away somewhere else and saved me the re-evaluation of my entire worldview.”

“You’d prefer it if you walked out and I was naked on your loveseat with the curtains open? Or if your neighbors found me on the front porch?” But he does as Hux had ordered, more or less, and downs his water all in one go. He does _not_ follow the next key instruction and lie back down, although he really is terribly pale. Perhaps that’s just his colouring.

They stare at each other for a while and it would be companionable if Hux wasn’t desperately and aggravatedly trying to figure out whether he would, in fact, have preferred either of those options.

“So,” Ren says once the pause is unendurable, drawing the vowel out probably just to increase Hux’s aggravation, “I’ve introduced myself.”

“And?”

“And you are…?”

“Oh.” Hux blinks, caught out. “It’s Hux. I apologise.”

“Hux,” Ren says, like he’s being careful to get all the letters in the right order. And then he does lie back, still clutching the empty water glass to his bare chest. He, for one, does not seem to be aggravated in the least by the situation. Maybe this happens all the time to people who spend half their time as wolves. “Your last name?”

“Yes,” Hux says. It also happens to be the only name he answers to, and he’s not inclined to offer more information while he’s on the back foot. “Now hold _still_ and let me look at this, if not for your peace of mind then for mine. I spent a fortune on bandaging at that horrible convenience store last night and I’d like to make sure there’s a return on my investment.”

Ren sniffs a little, disgruntled. Perhaps he suspects that Hux is motivated at least partly by wanting to regain the upper hand. Nevertheless, he does actually hold still and let Hux delicately peel back the edges of the gauze. It looks well enough. Better than he’d expected, honestly. Ren seems easy enough even with Hux prodding a bit at it; he pays close attention to what Hux is doing, his expression watchful but unbothered. The flesh there is all smooth muscle and Ren doesn’t so much as twitch to betray that Hux must be causing him pain. There seems to be nothing further to do for it, so Hux presses the bandages back into place and turns his attention to the wound on Ren’s face.

“This was much worse last night, too.” Last night it had been perhaps day-old and sticky with ichor. This morning it is darkly scabbed at its worst parts, knitting up already and pale at its edges. It’s healing clean, if not exactly pretty.

Ren doesn’t say anything for himself—Hux is touching carefully now at the edges of the cut and his fingers are dangerously close to Ren’s mouth. He blinks trustfully up at Hux though, crinkles his nose up when Hux just barely brushes his thumb where the very scarring edge runs along beside it.

“Does that hurt?” Hux asks. The new skin is hot as a fresh brand under his fingertips.

“Not… a lot,” Ren says, after thinking about it. He’s gone very solemn, as though he’s waiting for a doctor’s verdict.

“Hm.” Hux thumbs at the soft corner of his mouth, then gives in to rather urgent curiosity and pulls his lip back with that same thumb, exposing quite human-looking bicuspids. As if he’s checking a dog’s teeth. Ren lets him, perfectly pliable, like Hux is dealing with a very politely trained hound indeed. Hux can feel that his own pulse has gone awfully fast again. “I suppose if you bit me it would be very bad?”

Ren raises his eyebrows hugely at that, but waits until Hux has his hand completely clear before he only says, “Very.”

The number of people who have ever looked at Hux like that, like they trusted him with all his sharpness near where they themselves were soft, he could count on one hand. He could probably count it on one or two fingers. Two nights ago, he mistook Kylo Ren for someone’s very large pet dog.

This is dangerous. Worse than dangerous.

Ren is healing too damned quickly. Inhumanly so because, and Hux cannot avoid the thought although it seems worse now that he is actually touching Ren with his own hands, Ren cannot be entirely human. This is mad, completely insane. Forget two nights ago; _last_ night, Kylo Ren was literally a wild animal and Hux had been an idiot to bring him into his home. Hux might have been eaten alive in his bed. Hux had honestly expected it and had just not, somehow, given a fuck. Perhaps he’s dissociating.

“Does that bother you?” Ren asks, probably because Hux must look bothered. Or because Hux has not yet leaned back into range. “I won’t do it. The last time I bit someone it was— I won’t hurt you. Hux, I swear it.”

“I shall hold you to that,” Hux warns. Maybe he swears it, too. There’s something so very grave about Ren that it makes Hux want to answer him in kind.

Ren nods, painfully earnest. His hair is mussed up against Hux’s pillow; there’s some old blood in it just at the temple. _Nice,_ he’d said, like such an idiot. On nothing but spinal reflex, Hux folds at the middle and kisses him.

Hux kisses him and reacts with every square inch of his own skin, with all of his hair on end, with Ren’s sharp, sharp teeth so careful and his tongue so slow. An animal reaction. One that Hux didn’t even know he was having, only now he is _having it_. Hux kisses him and everything shivers straight into focus, and then he jerks himself very sharply back.

“I,” he says, no breath behind it and no idea what the rest of the excuse is, but then Ren reaches out for the very first time and touches _Hux_. His empty hand curled warm and strong at Hux’s shoulder, his knee crooked up even though—it must pull at his side, to twist into Hux like that.

Ren sets himself in to kiss on purpose this time, a little on an angle. Sighs a little and drops the fucking water glass straight off the edge of the bed to roll God knows where; pushes up into it frankly with his whole body. Into where Hux is running what he’d meant to be careful fingertips up under his jaw again. Only he has his palm spread out on Ren’s throat, instead, and Ren’s pulse is there like a trigger. Ren is human to the touch. 

Ren is heavy and immutable beneath Hux like no fairy-tale thing ever could be.

Hux lets himself press there at Ren’s throat and then press lower, thinking now about all the rest of the heat and the skin that is spread out in his bed. He could sink into that, crawl right into Ren, and he thinks that Ren would let him. Might let Hux do almost anything. He lets himself go easy, toys with his thumb at Ren’s nipple without breaking off—though he is thinking now of his mouth there, of his teeth in that flesh, of Ren bowing up into it as easily and as trustingly as he is here, now. Hux could break that trust—he could, so easily, and he doesn’t think—he twists at Ren’s nipple just on the edge of cruelty and like he’s heard Hux’s thoughts, Ren shudders, surges, mashes their mouths together _hard_.

He grabs at Hux two-handed with no apparent care for his own injuries, and no care for the fact that Hux might not wish to inflict any more. And Hux’s every nerve is screaming at him: Ren is human, human, naked, human. Is naked and defenseless and _human_ and still somehow Ren is under Hux by choice.

Is scrambling, in fact, to pull Hux _onto_ him—by the shoulder, by the hips, by the backs of his knees and the small of his back—like nothing about this has anything to do with what Hux might choose. It’s a terrible relief.

It is _such_ a relief, to let Ren manhandle him, to just let himself be held immobile against Ren’s chest by Ren’s huge hands and his huge body. To have someone else decide exactly where Hux ought to be and then just. Put him there. And hold him there with his legs spread. And just one of Ren’s hands feels like it’s the whole span of Hux’s back, and when Ren has Hux just so and he presses the whole length of his body up against Hux’s, hard, a filthy, slow grind like nothing is hurting him at all—and they are both hard, of course they are, of course Hux is, he’s been a little hard probably since Kylo Ren shut his damn mouth and let Hux touch him but now he’s _straddling_ all of that muscle, pulled tight down on top of it—Hux makes this tiny, hitched sound into Ren’s mouth that is nothing but absolute, mortifying gratitude.

They break off to stare at each other, and they are both of them panting like dogs.

Ren has his fist clenched in the back of Hux’s monogrammed pyjamas and even Hux can’t believe that he’d bought monogrammed pyjamas. He can’t believe that he’s _wearing_ them right now, can’t believe how ridiculous, how absolutely, unforgivably pretentious that is in a man who has _no one_ , who finds himself drunk and alone on a curb talking to stray animals, and yet Ren is holding onto him _tight_.

“Is this,” Hux manages to get out, and manages it remarkably steadily, “you said the other option was to claim me. If you didn’t kill me. Is this what we’re doing? Because I don't—”

“No,” Ren says, cuts him off flat, and God, Hux would have known he wasn’t human by his eyes now alone, “we’re not. I swore.”

“That you wouldn’t hurt me?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Ren growls, and rolls them both, finally, finally. Presses Hux flat on his back into the mattress and holds him down with his whole huge weight, thank _Christ_.

The thrill that spikes straight through Hux isn’t fear, although it should be. Oh, he knows, he should be afraid.


End file.
